As I described a while back, the Office Web Apps Server (formerly known as WAC) is required by both Lync 2013 and Exchange 2013 in order to make some of the functionalities work. Admitted, Exchange 2013 doesn’t actually require Office Web Apps, but if you want to take advantage of the preview-capabilities in Outlook Web App, you’ll have to deploy it anyway.

Installing and configuring the Office Web Apps Server isn’t all that difficult. If you followed my article correctly, you should end up with a working setup.

Curiously enough, it was a customer that pointed this out to me, if you run Get-OfficeWebAppsMachine on one of your servers, you’ll see that the health state of the Office Web Apps server is “Unhealthy”; even if it’s working as expected:

In the meanwhile, I have been digging into the issue but haven’t found the reason why it is reporting "Unhealthy” or even how to do anything about it. TechNet is really lacking on documentation as there’s not much info about it out there…

It seems that Office Web Apps is regularly polling for the state of several components and – based on the results – defines the health state. Given that some of these polls are failing (I have no idea why), I suspect the HealthStatus being set to Unhealthy.

If it were pure aesthetically, you could go to the following path and alter the topology.xml file, because it’s that file from where the Get-OfficeWebAppsMachine reads it state:

Anyway, as long as there’s no confirmation from Microsoft you should probably stay away from editing this file. Additionally, it will get overwritten when the server get polled for it’s health again.

Either way, I’m looking to get to the bottom of this. As soon as I’ve found something useful, I’ll get back to you. One thing is clear though: along the way of trying to get this solved, I did find some other interesting stuff I’d like to share with you soon.

In the meanwhile, if you have more information or if you see the same (weird) behavior, feel free to leave a message!